Pete Hamill Quotes

Copy editors are very important and too rarely praised.

What helps change bad writing into mediocre writing is editing. Editing is in bad shape in print journalism, and is in virtually nonexistent shape in online journalism.

Machines aren't replacing proofreaders at all. Copy editors, who proofread and much, much more, use spellcheck as a tool but read every word that appears in the paper.

The life of an editor is not a glamorous one. You're a fixer; you make things better.

Every book has mistakes in them, every one. There's never been a book published without mistakes.

I have a problem with blogs - all the best writers benefit from edits.

If you re-read your work, you can find on re-reading a great deal of repetition can be avoided by re-reading and editing.

My self-editing process is intense.

And the most important thing you can do is learn to edit yourself. And then go back and rewrite.

It's not hard to write poorly. But to write something good, it has to be revised.

Once you've finished typing and moving text around and everything else, you have to leave it alone for a while. You do that to see if it stands up, to see if all the loose edges have been trimmed, if it makes sense, if it's consistent, what shape it really has. You can't tell that while you're working on it.

Editing is the same as quarrelling with writers - same thing exactly.

I am guaranteeing you that if you see my byline on a story, it's going to be the cleanest story you've ever read.

I should mention something that nobody ever thinks about, but proofreading takes a lot of time. After you write something, there are these proofs that keep coming, and there's this panicky feeling that 'This is me and I must make it better.'

I'm pretty rigorous about the drafts I turn in. I don't turn in something that's so ungodly they go, 'What the hell is this?'

I write the paragraph, then I'm crossing out, changing words, trying to improve it. When it seems more or less OK, then I type it up because sometimes it's almost illegible, and if I wait, I might not be able to read it the next day.

After my husband spell-checks one of my manuscripts, my editor says, 'It's been Normanized.'

Sometimes I can spend as long revising a manuscript as I spent writing it in the first place.

I always rewrite each day up to the point where I stopped. When it is all finished, naturally you go over it. You get another chance to correct and rewrite when someone else types it, and you see it clean in type. The last chance is in the proofs. You're grateful for these different chances.

I read what I write over and over and make corrections and improvements, until I reach the conclusion that the material deserves to stand on its own.

I used to work as a proofreader at Merrill Lynch.

I'm constantly revising. Once the book is written and typed, I go through the entire draft again.

When you're editing, you want to be the perfect appreciator, not another writer.

Like all editors, I assume, I'm a reactor.

Which editor? I can't think of one editor I worked with as an editor. The various companies did have editors but we always acted as our own editor, so the question has no answer.